Sparrow
by J. Elisabeth
Summary: A stranded human child and her accidental guardian find that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In progress.
1. Chapter 1

**Sparrow**

* * *

_Note: As speculative fiction, Trek takes on questions of morality, progress, and the meaning of humanity; this is my first foray into that ring. A big universe brushes up against the Federation, so readers looking for familiar characters will find they have only a cameo here.  
_

_Disclaimer: Incidental overlap with the Trek universe is deliberate, but does not profit me in any way. _

_Rating: K+. _

* * *

"She is my child, Doctor Bashir," I say firmly. I can just hear the translator they have pinned to my chest, conveying the words; it is supposed to be undetectable, but because it has to transpose the words up into the impossibly high register that is the middle of their aural range, every word is accompanied by a persistent whine.

The doctor folds his instrument and leans up against the pallet, an expression of skepticism and barely veiled anger on his face. His face – so much like hers, I cannot stop thinking, so much like my Tenhu. "I'm sorry, Mr. Nuirin," he says, and his disdain makes my skin crawl, because even though I hate his judgment I know that it is fair. "But anyone who can do this to a helpless child – "

But I should begin at the beginning, because before she was a helpless child we had crippled, she was a deformed infant left on our doorstep. It's all a question of context.


	2. Chapter 2

**Sparrow, continued.**

* * *

_Subject 109. Female, aged approximately three years, with extensive congenital and developmental deformities. She was found in the Daimorth Quarter, in the northern forest, and her parents have not been traced. We cannot condone abandoning children, but it is clear that her care would be far beyond the means of any family._

_Her superficial deformities are many, from altered facial structure to immature, unscaled skin. Her most obvious defect is skeletal; her joints are rotated between 4 and 11% from standard position, and preliminary examination suggests that bone density and shape are also abnormal. While this difference may seem trivial to the layperson, it is enough to cause distinct abnormalities in her motion, and as she grows may further inhibit her ability to participate in everyday activities. We will attempt standard and pharmaceutical therapies, but surgery will probably be necessary._

_As to any cognitive disability or mental retardation, we do not yet know – 109 has been sedated since her arrival. It seems unlikely, however, that such dramatic congenital defects would spare neurological function._

* * *

The only thing that makes sense is that it was all a dream. The grey room with the green blankets, the white curtains behind which the stars hid at night, the smiling woman with the awkward, gentle hands who rolled me up in the green blankets and laughed us together into sleep.

Oh yes. Especially her: she must have been a dream. The only mystery is where she came from, how I invented the blue gleam on her long black plait, the rough spots on her narrow palms. Her hands like mine, fingers bent in too many places, so I must have imagined from them from my own. The golden brown of her eyes, warm in the cold white light, and the nervous way her fingers fluttered over me, with matter-of-fact love.

There are other pieces, so that it must have been a hundred dreams, a thousand. There were other people with the same thin skin in shades of pink and brown and gold, swathed in clothes with names I don't remember, steps clicking against the hard ground. They smiled at me and swooped me into their arms, folded me to their sides. With the largess of fantasy, they laid out feasts when I was hungry, foods that crunched between my teeth and slid across my tongue. Lucky, Akhe told me once, that you are king in your dreams. Some of us are still peasants.

And then everything was colored red, between grey walls in her firm terrified arms, and things are blurred and loud and confused. There is a pause, a sliding of stars around the bubble of my breath, and then the world dissolved in white light.

That must have been waking up.

* * *

Caring for research subjects is not a career anyone chooses. It is messy, unpleasant, thankless, and I did not choose it either. No, I ended up in the skeletal research wing of the Third Medical Facility the way everyone does: I lacked the education and temperament for anything else. I worked long hours in the yellow rooms of the facility, cleaning and feeding animals deformed by accidents of birth and deliberate mutations.

Worse were the occasional infants who came our way, crying and drooling and embarrassing their exhausted parents. A rootless adolescent from Martesh Quarter, I had never memorized my parent's lullabies or planned on a half a dozen children of my own, but I learned like any new father how to hold a baby against my neck, damp breath beating against my pulse. They only stayed for a few days, these broken children, before their parents collected them again, but when they died – because they all died, killed by their twisted spines and collapsed rib cages – sometimes their parents would bring them back. "If you can learn anything," the mother would say, eyes dark with sorrow and relief and shame, tumbling the blanket-wrapped body into my arms. "If it helps someone else's baby live."

For me, it was awful, crushing work, but the investigators took each sniffling, doomed infant and folded themselves deeper into that obsessive dedication, the grim determination of doctors who have devoted their lives to hopeless causes.

* * *

_It has long been a barrier to our progress that our subjects are too young to undergo surgery and too weak for all but the most basic of pharmacological solutions. This child - well past infancy, able to breathe, digest, move, perhaps even speak - is an ideal subject for the next necessary phase. If we can understand the skeletal abnormalities in a mature subject and refine the treatments, it may be possible to correct the same syndromes in infancy. It is a truly exciting prospect._

_And of course, we will be restoring this child to health. She will be the first._


	3. Chapter 3

**Sparrow, continued.**

* * *

Sedated, she was just like the others. I had to dribble water through her lips, wash her, turn her over every few hours to keep her skin from chafing. Yes, she was bigger, her skin more delicate, her clenching hands strangely articulated, but folded on my lap she was still a baby, her limbs limp and her heart fluttering.

It was not until the narcotics wore off that I realized how different her care would be. I remember, I was struck as soon as her eyes opened that they were not clouded with pain or dull with idiocy, but clear and bright. As she blinked back the drugs and focused on my face, I took in the green of her eyes, stellated with brown and gold, the pupils expanding in the dim light. She was placid, intelligent, still, and for just a moment I thought that perhaps she was a spirit, a messenger, an angel, because she couldn't possibly have been a monster, twisted by birth.

But then she whimpered inaudiably, squirmed in the little nest, and the moment passed. I helped her sit up and held a cup of thin white broth to her lips, and with an urgency born of near-starvation she gulped it down. Wrapping her thin little hands around it, she tilted her head back for every last drop even as she grimaced at the taste.

"What's your name, _tenhu_?" I asked her when she finished and sat regarding me with apprehension. She bit her lip, and I repeated the question, trying to make my voice gentler, and when she opened her mouth I half expected her to demand her mother, tell me to get away from her, that she knew better than to give her name to strangers.

But she didn't say anything, just silently shaped a few words, then reached out and touched my forehead, running her delicate little hand across my scaled brow. She moved her lips again, but no matter what I said she didn't respond.

The researchers decided that she was an idiot, incapable of comprehending or producing language. They added it to her list of deformities, ranked its treatment somewhere behind drug therapies to encourage scale growth and knee rotation surgery. I believed them, of course, because they had the experience and the advanced medical degrees, but except for her silence she was no more of a moron than the children who ran screaming around the schoolyard downtown. Those children drew my eye as I trudged home in the morning, all sturdy skin and rolling gaits. Their movements were not as quick or determined, their eyes not quite as bright; how could she be an idiot? I closed my curtains against the daylight and stared blindly at the ceiling, trying not to think about the tests I had administered to generations of laboratory animals, and how painful and frightening they might be for a three year old child.

Each evening, though, I arrived to find her groggy from the anesthetic, hungry and confused, tears leaking from her eyes as I gathered her up into my arms, and while she snuffled into my chest she _was_ an infant, a monster, a mewling kit who needed me to wash and feed and dress her. A world apart from those bold, competent children rolling down the street.

Once the drugs wore off, though, that crucial distinction started to melt away. She was small, yes, and walked strangely - but she could walk, propel herself with startling speed around the yellow rooms, scale the furniture after what she wanted. She could feed herself, though she handled the utensils awkwardly and uncertainly, and once I showed her how to fasten the tunic she dressed herself, too. In the bath, she mercilessly scrubbed her arms and legs, and only reluctantly ceded the washcloth so that I could scrub her back. Sure, she dropped the cloth and misbuttoned her pajamas, but she was a child, and all children do that, don't they?

* * *

Akhe calls me Little Bird. It's a flutter of the fingers, an abrupt flap that in his hands is clumsy but tender and in mine impatient, frustrated. Another twitch and it's _to fly_, turn the hand over an it's _to fall_, both hands is _imagination, quickening, love._ All bound up together, that little bird and these grand ideas – but then, there are only so many ways to move your hands.

* * *

I don't know what they did to her during the day, for those first few years. I preferred not to know. I noticed that her skin was never broken, aside for the occasional puncture mark on her arm, and she was never bruised, except for where the leg brace they used pressed into her hips. After she bathed and ate, she would shake off the lethargy of the day and become animated, exploring the room and the few toys left behind by other children with gusto. She was particularly fascinated by the storybooks, and sat turning pages and staring with fierce concentration.

I brought her new ones that I collected from the used-goods stalls in my neighborhood. "Here, _tenhu_," I would say, passing them into her eager hands. "Here's 'Treetop Tales,' and 'The Adventures of Nilaidi.' That was my favorite when I was your age." I talked to her constantly, though she didn't seem to notice and never even turned her head.

It wasn't that she didn't respond to me, though - when she was focused on me, she responded to my facial expressions and gestures with her own. Words, even shouted, wouldn't break her concentration, but if I shut the door with any particular force the faint _clap_ would make her jump. I began to wonder about her hearing then, because while some animals reacted to taps and stomps and claps as normal noises within their aural range, most children didn't even hear them. Was it possible that she wasn't an idiot at all, but just hard of hearing?

A series of very unscientific experiments proved it, at least to me: she couldn't hear a word I said, but she could hear it when I squeaked at the top of my range, when I tapped my fingers on the tables, the screeching of the rodents which was inaudible to me. I should have gone to the doctors right away, but surely they would notice, their complete, careful examinations would bring it up. For all I knew they were already planning therapies and inventing surgeries for this bizarre, specialized deafness.

No, my concern was not medical but practical: my job would be easier if she could communicate, even at the most basic level. Her fascination with the books, the way she mumbled wordlessly to herself, her intense scrutiny of my face - all should have told me that she was able and eager and desperate for words.

It began with a few manual signs, motions she could make with her strange fingers: _food, sleep, water._ I searched the basements of libraries for sign language dictionaries, the relics of a past before universal infant screenings and government-sponsored corrective surgery, and practiced gestures - _pain, book, doctor, nest, good night_ - until my fingers moved effortlessly with every word I spoke. There was no one living on the same continent as I was to teach me grammar, inflection, or the past tense, but I settled for simple nouns, childish verbs, the rudiments of language.

On a whim, I looked up _tenhu_. It wasn't in the first three books I searched, but at last I found it, buried in _A Deaf Naturalist's Companion_. I twined my stuttering fingers together, eyes glued to the page, and my palm flew upwards, uncertain, transformed. A little bird, hidden in my own two hands.


	4. Chapter 4

**Sparrow, continued.**

* * *

The doctors build a ring of ice and silence around me. My skin tastes of metal and smells sour, and the rush and roar of their gazes muffles even my own voice. Screams and shouts do not break their concentration or the deliberate insistence of their cold hands. It is lonelier than being alone, to be so scrutinized but so ignored, and so I fill the silence with sounds half-remembered from my dreams, click my lips and teeth and tongue, create my own names for the doctors that they will never hear.

* * *

Over the several years she had been at Third, she had grown. Her limbs were sturdy, her spine stubbornly straight, and every few months the researchers begged me to shave off the wiry pelt that sprung from her head. I worried over her appetite, her changing sleep patterns, how thin and vulnerable her skin still seemed, but my earliest concerns - that she would be another helpless, incontinent, shrieking mutant - were all but forgotten. It seemed remarkable that so many serious deformities could balance themselves out, but they say there are many strange and wonderful things in the world. Her luck, perhaps, was just another.

Four years after her arrival, after hundreds of consultations and applications, the researchers were ready to begin the surgeries they had been planning and arguing about for so long. Drug courses had only left her nauseated, and braces and splints had bruised her tender skin but not changed the direction of her growth.

I wasn't told much about the scheduled surgeries, but from overheard conversations and the post-operative care instructions I was given, I guessed that none of the planned therapies would address her hearing. They did not believe me when I told them that she was intelligent but mute, and now, months after introducing signs to her with no response, I was beginning to think that I had imagined communication where none existed. Perhaps the doctors were right, and she was simply an extraordinarily emotive autistic, good at eye contact but without the capacity for language.

The night before her first procedure, she was very angry with me: I hadn't let her eat. She stormed around her room, evading my grasp and throwing herself at the locked cabinets where the supplies were stored. I tried distracting her with books, a bath, toys and games, but she just dissolved into frustrated tears, her wails inaudible but her misery plain.

We spent what felt like hours in a silent standoff, she glaring from where she had curled up at the foot of her nest, me exhausted by the table, eyes fixed on her furious, unhappy face. I was so focused on that face, her scrunched eyes and flushed cheeks, that I almost missed it.

She moved her left hand. One finger extended from a clenched fist, she drew her hand from the hollow of her neck to her left shoulder. It was perfect, textbook, exactly what I had been doing for months whenever I gestured toward the food cabinet. She did it again and again, her motions growing wilder, until I crossed the room and knelt by her nest, catching her hand to still it.

I know you're hungry, I clumsily signed back. She stared, puzzled, at my hands. I repeated it, and this time she echoed the last few, pointing at herself and repeating the _hunger_ motion. Not today, I signed. Tomorrow.

I knew she didn't know the words; I didn't know if she understood the concepts, or ever would. But unlike when I spoke aloud to her, I wasn't just keeping myself company. This she could see, and learn, and understand.

After that first response, I compiled lists of nouns, stacks of paper scratched with my crabbed shorthand on the various signs. When the researchers returned her to me, drugged and mewling, I lined objects across the table, curled her in my lap, and showed them to her, one by one. When I fed her, I signed; when we looked through books, I stumbled along; when she slept and when she woke, I greeted her with signs.

She followed every motion with alert bright eyes, sometimes with interest, sometimes with frustration. From time to time her deformed fingers would flutter back, an echo, a comment I couldn't understand; at first it was rare that she would repeat a sign, or respond with anything I recognized. But as the weeks, then months, wore on, it became a game; she would point at objects, act out movements, stab insistently at the pages of books as she watched me with a piercing, focused stare. She sent me wildly searching through dictionaries, to find ways to say _run_, _dance, somersalt _- and then after I left the facility she sent me to libraries, used book stores, junk sales, in search of more and better dictionaries.

I barely noticed when she started signing, so gradual was the transition, so effortless and beautiful the motion of her twisted little hands. _Food_, she'd demand one week. The next, at meal time, it would be _I want to eat. _And days later, _Is there bread with soup today_? Her progress was astonishing, and she would string signs together when she needed a new word and I was slow to understand. _No,_ she'd say, pushing away the tunic I offered her, one forefinger bent to her palm in damning negative. _Nest-clothes, I need nest-clothes! _And eventually I would understand: she wanted more blankets.

She strung verbs and nouns together, made up her own elaborate grammar, found ways to talk about herself and me and us together. She signed to herself when she was playing, moved the arms of her stuffed toys to make them answer back, twitched her fingers while she slept. It was like watching an infant learn to babble, years late, and once she began she would not stop. She demanded new words, as though they were air or water and she needed them just as desperately.

And one day we read a story about a little brown-and-gold bird, tree-dweller, seed-scratcher. _Tenhu,_ I showed her, my fingers flying across the pages. _Like you, _I added, _tenhu, little bird. _She repeated the sign, then said, slowly, _name for me?_

_Yes,_ I told her. _You. Little bird._


End file.
